After working on a large scale RPG project for 2 years, I’ve learned quite a bit. Mainly through the process of making stupid decisions. Below I’ve catalogued 8 things I’ve learned that could save you up to 6 months or more on your next project.

About 6 months ago I sat down to tackle writing a custom skill tree system in Unity. I wanted a visual editor that could easily assemble a tree at the same complexity level of Skyrim. And magically assemble all the data into a visual output without lifting an extra finger. After a couple days of combining some old scripts with a shiny new interface I created Unity Skill Tree Pro. A free plugin that makes complex skill tree management automated.

This is just the first iteration of Unity Skill Tree Pro. So the visual editor is still a little rough. That said it does a lot out of the box right now. If you want to customize it further the source is freely available online and it was written to be easily extendable without touching source code.

For A Dragon Named Coal in Unity, I needed an optimized way of exploding crates, windows, enemies, and other common items. Here I’m going to give a quick overview of how we accomplished the GIF effect above in an optimized fashion.

After a long period of development, I’m proud to announce a free playable web demo for A Dragon Named Coal. I’m a founder on the game with my wife. I serve as the project’s lead developer and writer. Enough said though, go play the game and let me know what you think. Also please vote for us on GameJolt if you want to support this project.

A Star (*) pathfinding is great, but how do you use it for a 2D platformer game where you have characters jumping from ledge to ledge? To try and demonstrate a potential solution I assembled the following GitHub experiment that explains how to solve the issue.